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I learned a really important life lesson during my research. You see, I do this kind of thing. This is ray tracing, or a light transport simulation as we call it. And it has a superpower: what is that? Well, it can simulate reality! Yes. This is really possible - no AI needed at all. You can give it a scene, and it will simulate the path of light rays bouncing around, and give you an image of what that scene would look like in reality. It is absolutely insane that we can do that. I love it. But wait, not so fast. Even if you do it perfectly, at first, this is what it looks like.
Oh my, this is terrible. What is going on? Well, that is the life lesson. This was just simulating one ray going through each of these pixels. That is what we call one sample. One sample is not enough. If you do two samples, you get something like this. Better? Maybe a bit. A hundred samples? Getting better, but still, a long way off. And after millions and millions of rays, we get the beautiful final image. When you first do it, it is a very emotional moment. When we started, I thought this would be impossible, and yet here it is. So here is two things I'd like to share with you: one is a life lesson that I learned. Even if you have the perfect system, at first, it might seem that it does not work at all. But you
have to keep at it. And it may take a long time. And two, I'd love to share this feeling with you, but it's impossible, because when you first succeed, it is beyond words. But wait, I think I found a way to actually share this feeling with you. Through a song. A popular request from you Fellow Scholars, so here it is. And if you watch until the end of the video, I'll give you something so you can also create a simulation like this yourself for free. Alright, with that said, this is Károly and The Papers.
That was so much fun, I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. I am not sure if I ever heard a song written about ray tracing. Alright, I promised you something. And it is for free. I taught this master level course at the Technical University of Vienna, and I think knowledge should be for free for everyone. So it's not like the courses you see elsewhere, it is completely free, in fact you can't even pay for it even if you wanted. Although this Fellow Scholar was hilarious. Alright, so in this one, I try my best to teach you the physics of light, and then we code up a simulation program together, from scratch. Enjoy!
